The District Manager
Read The District Manager Online
Authors: Matt Minor
The District Manager
Copyright 2016 by Matt Minor
Printed in the United States. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author/publisher except by a reviewer,
who may quote brief passages in a review.
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current or local events or to living persons is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Minor, Matt
ISBN 978-0-9906120-9-4
1. Texas Politics—Political Fiction 2. Texas—Culture—Fiction
3. Political Suspense
FIC Min
Cover Design
Rebecca Byrd Arthur
Editor
Mindy Reed, The Authors’ Assistant
Printed in the United States of America
SPECIAL DEDICATION
For Caroline and Sullivan
with love
OFFICIAL DEDICATION
To Madame Guillotine
Ay, that incestuous, that adulterous beast
— Ghost of Hamlet’s Father
The intellect of man must choose,
Perfection of the life or the work
— Yeats
And Hell is filled with the respectable
... The titles and trophies piled near by
To be melted and cast to commemorate
The trickery ever-legal: the lie.
— M. Minor
CHAPTER E
IGHT
Part I
JULY
Doing the right thing means you don’t eat.
I should have known this almost universal of maxims. But I refused to acknowledge it. I steered and stuttered my way through traffic, distracted along the way by a series of dead dogs that filled consecutive ditches. I love dogs.
After winding through an arbor of live oaks that shrouded the wealthy streets, I arrived at the scheduled meeting at the Fort Bryan County Courthouse.
I’ll say it again, “Doing the right thing means you don’t eat.”
I should have known this, given my recent experiences, but all I could think of was getting a drink and finding adequate air-conditioning. This was July in southeast Texas, it was not just hot as hell, but humid as a steam room. And the A/C on my fifteen year-old, white Expedition functioned like a martyr on her way to the scaffold—defiant yet hopeful…
HAPTER
O
NE
A
D
ISTRICT
M
ANAGER?
I keep the engine humming and hang back after I roll into the slanted parking space across from the courthouse. I’m waiting…waiting for the politicians to siphon into the historical structure. I don’t want to get stuck talking to anyone I don’t have to.
I’m not wearing a suit—thank God—but a rather cheap, white, short-sleeved golf shirt and black slacks. Still, I can feel a significant sweat stain on my back as I enter the building. One of the benefits of working for a state official is that you can bypass nearly any security. I flash the sheriff ’s deputy my badge and skip the metal detector altogether.
The meeting is at the top, on the fourth floor. This is an old structure and the air-conditioning kind of sucks. As I climb the circular steps, I haven’t stopped sweating. I ascend upon a display of the Six Flags Over Texas. The cigarettes have caught up with me I guess, because here at the top I’m out of breath.
“You need to lay off those things, Mason!” the assistant prosecutor comments, his voice echoing into the recently restored rotunda. He’s loitering in the spherical lobby and thumbing his cell phone. Like all prosecutors’ side men, he lacks any sense of the political, he’s a plain asshole, in fact. We have an understanding: I don’t like him and he doesn’t like me. I enter the meeting room, squeezing past his suited, unaccommodating bloat.
My boss is already there and is sitting towards the front of an immense wooden table with other officials from the area. He nods in acknowledgment of my existence. The remaining seats are filled with different experts: a few cops and several county elected officials. The assistant prosecutor snakes the last available seat. I pull up a spare chair. After assessing this cabal, my attention is drawn towards the large expanse of bookshelves that line the length of the opposite wall. The shelves are filled from floor to ceiling with tan, hardback editions of the
Southwestern Reporter,
an old-school legal resource from the days before computers.
Introductions are in order, and when it’s my turn I stand and give my name and occupation. “Mason Dixon!” I declare, knowing that those in the room who don’t know me will think it almost strange, maybe somewhat comical. “I’m the District Manager for House District 100!” My boss, the state rep who I work for, signals discreetly with his hand for me to sit down.
I am distracted as the meeting fires up. From the corner of my right eye, I notice a figure enter the room. She pulls out a chair and gracefully sits down. I turn my head towards the entryway where she is presently sitting, as proper as in a pew. It’s Brenna, the county judge’s assistant. She’s staring right at me with a giant smile across her rosy cheeks. We have met before. Here at the courthouse, in fact. I felt something then. I feel it now.
By what I’m able to gather, this meeting has something to do with sex trafficking in the county. Seeping in from the city, just due east, this is a growing enterprise that has finally caught the attention of public servants.
As pretentious as this collection might be, as they banter around the table, all talk is loaded with good intentions. The only problem is that these good intentions mean suspending civil liberties. The worst is the local congresswoman. She even suggests spying on one’s neighbors. Yes, the helicopter mentality spins in mysterious ways. If a child scrapes their knee on the sidewalk, then the abrasiveness of concrete must be regulated, or at least investigated. If those diabolical shoe-laces were complicit in the fall, then…something must be done about that as well! Followed to its logical conclusion, said child will never be allowed to leave the playpen, that too bereft of playthings—too dangerous.
When this meeting mercifully ends, I’m left with the impression that given another fifteen minutes someone was going to suggest a law banning men—any man—from coming into contact with children under thirty. To his credit, my boss has said very little.
Brenna has vanished.
The Rep. and I make conversation as we filter out into the blazing heat.
“So how do you like living in an apartment?” he asks, shielding himself from the offensive elements with this hand.
“It’s taking time…getting adjusted. At first it was so claustrophobic, having lived in the country for so long.”
“Are you gonna sell the place?” he asks, tugging on his clothes as if he’s on fire. The boss is huge, not fat but tall and big boned. If he weren’t so uncoordinated he might have played basketball.
“I don’t know. The taxes will go up without the homestead. I don’t know what I’m going to do with it.”
“Well, Wagoneer County will miss you if you pull up stake for good.”
This is so obviously a false claim that it is difficult for me to pretend otherwise. “Yeah, maybe.” I shrug, squinting my eyes. I’ve left my sunglasses in the car.
“How long has it been?” This question is even more awkward, exacerbated by his twitching under the sun.
“You mean since Ann…?”
“Yes.”
“Coming up on a year.”
Before parting, we are interrupted by the congress-woman from the meeting. She still fails to acknowledge me, although I have met her probably seven-hundred times. It doesn’t matter, I’m ready to go. Though this is a Thursday, tomorrow is the Fourth. Besides, she’s had so much plastic surgery at this point she looks like a freak and I don’t feel like faking it.
